Matthew Carr's Blog, page 5

Of Packs and Herds

Child sexual exploitation (CSE) is a horrendous crime that can occur in any society and at any time. It can take many forms, from financial and other ‘rewards’ in exchange for sex, to physical coercion, intimidation or emotional manipulation. It can be carried within institutions, such as the Catholic Church, the Church of England, the Kincora Boys’ Home, or Ampleforth and Downside public schools. Children can be abused by powerful men like Rolf Harris or Jimmy Saville, operating in plain sight under cover of institutional impunity; they can be abused within families, or through organized networks.

Some perpetrators operate in so-called ‘grooming gangs’ that lure vulnerable children into paedophile networks and then transform them into commodities to be trafficked and shared between groups of men. The concept of ‘grooming gangs’ is not a legal category, and the term tends to be applied selectively. In April 2023, for example, twenty-one people were sentenced in what the Evening Standard called ‘one of the largest child sex grooming gangs ever’.

The defendants - all of whom were white men and women - received 145 years imprisonment between them for what one detective called ‘the most abhorrent and cruel abuse’ carried out over a ten-year period against seven children under the age of twelve in Walsall and Wolverhampton. A few readers may recall the mugshots above, but these crimes received little media attention, and generated no political response whatsoever. The Evening Standard was one of the few media outlets to actually refer to the perpetrators as a ‘grooming gang’.

Most media commentary referred to the network as a ‘child sex abuse ring’ or a ‘paedophile gang’, and such commentary barely went beyond bare-bones reporting. Though the Sun described the perpetrators of these ‘barbaric’ crimes as ‘twisted’ and ‘sickos’, this case did not have any wider social or political ramifications. There was no media soul-searching, no demonstrations by the EDL, no grandstanding pledges from politicians, no dark mutterings about the ‘conspiracies of silence’ supposedly prevalent amongst particular communities and social groups.

On April 2 2023 - only days before the Walsall and Wolverhampton sentences were announced, the then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced the formation of a ‘Grooming Gangs Taskforce’ to tackle offences that she claimed were perpetrated by ‘groups of men, almost all British-Pakistani’. In an article in the Daily Mail, Braverman pledged a crack down on the ‘systematic rape, exploitation and abuse of young girls by organised gangs of older men’ and described ‘the disgraceful failure of the authorities to act despite ample evidence’ as ‘a stain on our country.'

Few people familiar with Braverman’s disreputable political record were surprised when she went on to describe the perpetrators of these crimes as 'groups of men, who hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values'. In September that year, the Mail withdrew the reference to ‘British-Pakistani men’ following a complaint by the Centre for Media Monitoring, with the explainer that this reference was limited to ‘high-profile cases’ such as Rotherham and Rochdale. The Mail also noted that ‘the perpetrators of child sexual abuse, more broadly, are a variety of ethnicities’.

Musk Joins the Bandwagon

Such nuances and retractions are rare amongst the right-wing British press, and they are entirely absent amongst the ethnonationalist right that does not have the same claims to mainstream respectability. For these sectors, ‘grooming gangs’ or ‘rape gangs’ are only of interest when the perpetrators are South Asian, Pakistani or Muslim men. For some years now, far-right organizations have claimed that white girls have been raped ‘on an industrial scale’ by men from these communities, and now these allegations have attained a spurious legitimacy, thanks to the World’s Richest Man.

By now, few people who read a newspaper or scroll on their mobile phone will be unaware of Musk’s latest hazy k-hole take on British politics. Not content with amplifying disinformation during the summer’s riots, Musk has now entered the debate about grooming gangs, with the malign ill-intent and downright ignorance that characterizes almost all his public utterances.

There is a long and forensic article by Sian Norris on Open Democracy on Musk’s latest interventions and their context, which I highly recommend. For the purposes of this article, let’s just recall that Musk resumed his attempts to destroy the Labour government just over a week ago by claiming that something called ‘rape genocide’ has been unfolding in the UK for years with the complicity of Keir Starmer and the Labour party.

What is ‘rape genocide’? Well nothing actually. It’s intellectual vomit - the kind that you might emit as you slide off the couch into a ketamine slump with fragments of the Great Replacement Theory coursing through your drug-addled brain.

Musk also called Jess Phillips a ‘rape genocide apologist’ and a ‘wicked witch’, because she rejected calls for a national inquiry into CSE offences, on the grounds that such inquiries are more effective when carried out by local councils. The valiant crusader went on to accuse Gordon Brown of having ‘sold those little girls for votes - another baseless, ridiculous lie. He claimed that more than one million white girls have been raped in the UK by South Asian grooming gangs - an insane allegation based on estimates from the MP Sarah Champion claimed which she herself has called ‘completely unreliable.’

Musk went on to describe Tommy Robinson - an equally brazen far-right grifter who has made ‘rape gangs’ and ‘grooming gangs’ his trademark grift - as a ‘political prisoner’. Never mind that Robinson is in jail (again), not because of his truthtelling, but for contempt of court, in repeating slanderous claims about a Syrian refugee, in other words for his lie-telling.

It takes one not to know one, and so Musk claimed that Robinson is in jail for ‘speaking out’ against grooming gangs - all of which will undoubtedly bring Robinson a lot of money when he gets out of prison.

The Financial Times has written about how Musk got these ideas from some very right-wing accounts on his own platform X. In (dis) information terms, Musk increasingly resembles the scene from Scarface, when Al Pacino goes out of his mind hoovering up piles of his own cocaine. But given Musk’s position as the Richest Man in the World, and his new role as Donald Trump’s sinister henchman, his baseless claims immediately set in motion the kind of rolling news and political cycle that you might expect if Moses had just descended from Mount Sinai.

Nigel Farage immediately defended Musk’s attacks on Jess Phillips on the grounds of freezepeach and it may be offensive but the left is just as bad, etc, etc. There was a kind of morbid humour in this intervention. Musk had previously withdrawn his support for Farage, because Farage will not accept, at least publicly, any future role for Robinson in Reform. But even though Farage’s political instincts are sharper than Musk’s, he knows what side his party’s bread is buttered on. And so he tried to ingratiate himself with the World’s Richest Man with his usual oily dishonesty, by asking - just askin’ questions! - why Robinson is in solitary - thereby echoing Musk’s assertion that Robinson is in a ‘solitary confinement prison for telling the truth.’

This is how these bastards roll.

The answer to Farage’s question is that Robinson appears to be in solitary for his own protection, because a lot of his fellow-prisoners hate him, not because the British state is trying to ‘silence’ him. If these allegations were made - and they often are - by some anonymous avatar on X, they would not even be worth a millisecond of the world’s contempt. But because the man who made them is the World’s Richest Man, and because we live in a world in which the most sordid far-right political talking points are now common currency on the platform that Musk owns, an array of politicians, influencers and tawdry scriveners without even the semblance of a moral compass immediately embraced the possibilities that Musk had given them.

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These nationalist-populists hunt in packs or herds - I’m never sure which - and when a rich billionaire blows on his bugle, they will immediately follow the scent that has been presented to them. Frank Furedi, the synthetic leftwing intellectual-turned-Orban fanboy argued in his substack column, that ‘Racial Vengeance gets a free pass in grooming gang Britain.’ How so? Because, according to Furedi:

the rapist gangs happen to be mainly Pakistani, and their victims white, is not an accident. Why? Because these men are not simply motivated by misogyny nor by sexual domination, but also by racial vengeance.

You can’t argue with reasoning like that, any more than you can embrace fog. But such observations led naturally to Furedi’s equally incisive claim that:

The refusal to publicly acknowledge the racial dimension of these crimes constitutes a betrayal of the victims. The most powerless section of British society is sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism.

Such righteous indignation. Such principled truthtelling. It’s enough to make Suella Braverman weep. According to the Jay Report on sexual exploitation in Rotherham:

Representatives of women’s groups were frustrated that interpretations of the Borough’s problems with CSE (Child Sexual Exploitation] were often based on an assumption that similar abuse did not take place in their own community and therefore concentrated mainly on young white girls.

One local Pakistani women’s group told the inquiry that ’Pakistani-heritage girls were targeted by tax drivers and one occasion by older men lying in wait outside school gates at dinner times and after school.’ The inquiry cited a 2013 report from the UK Muslim Women’s Network, which ‘highlighted that Asian girls were being sexually exploited where authorities were failing to identify or support them’ in ways that mirrored the ‘abuse committed by Pakistani-heritage perpetrators on white girls in Rotherham.’

This is vile, despicable stuff, but it is not politically-useful vileness, and therefore the likes of Furedi don’t even acknowledge it. Far better to frame these crimes as acts of ‘racial vengeance’ perpetrated exclusively by Asian-heritage men against white girls.

This racialization of particular crimes is not new. As the criminologist Paul Knepper once observed (paywalled) in the decades leading up to World War I, ‘journalists, politicians, and anti-immigrant agitators introduced a vocabulary blending racial identity and criminality’ with regards to Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe in the East End who were associated with prostitution and sexual trafficking.

Chinese migrants in late-nineteenth century Britain were similarly associated with drug addiction, gambling and ‘white slavery.’ The allegations of the ‘industrial-level’ rape of white girls by Pakistani or Muslim men belongs to the same grim tradition. This is not to suggest that these crimes are invented. There is no doubt that white working class girls (among others) have been sexually exploited by organized or semi-organized networks in cities in the north of England, whose members consist overwhelmingly of South Asian heritage men.

There is some anecdotal evidence - cited in the Jay and Casey reports - to suggest that local councillors have been reluctant to address these crimes, because of fears that they would be accused of racism. The Jay report also claims that the police refused to see the victims of these crimes as victims, and held them in contempt.

These are serious individual and institutional failings, which the Jay report has sought to address in its recommendations. But the report also notes that ‘there is no simple link between race and child sexual exploitation, and across the UK the greatest numbers of of perpetrators of CSE are white men.’ A 2020 Home Office report also argued that

Research on offender ethnicity is limited, and tends to rely on poor quality data. It is therefore difficult to draw conclusions about differences in ethnicity in offenders, but it is likely that no one one community or culture is uniquely predisposed to offending. A number of studies have indicated an over-representation of Asian and Black offenders in group-based CSE. Most of the same studies show that the majority of offenders are white.

Once again, such conclusions are not politically-useful to the anti-grooming gang crusaders. To those who already believe that certain immigrant communities are ‘alien’ intruders in white society, it is far more convenient to believe that an entire community of Asian heritage men has allowed to systematically rape white girls with the collusion of the liberal ‘multicultural elites’ who are supposedly dragging us all to ruin.

Such accusations were largely restricted to the far-right, until Musk began to get high on his own radicalized supply. Now the Daily Telegraph can be found thundering that ‘child victims of rape were denied justice and state protection to preserve the illusion of a multicultural society.’ On Matt Goodwin’s podcast, he and the repellently racist Reform MP Rupert Lowe chorus ‘deport them all.’ Naturally, Robert Jenrick - one of the most wretchedly amoral politicians in the wretched ranks of his dying party, can be found in the Telegraph, opining

we need to end mass migration. Not all cultures are equal: importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women, brought us here. And after 30 years of this disastrous experiment, we now have entrenched sectarian voting blocs that make it electoral suicide for some MPs to confront this.

Elsewhere, Daniel Hannan, another great friend of the working class, was playing the same tuneless dirge::

Somewhere in a corner of a half-empty studio in America, Liz Truss also managed to sum up the intellectual energy to suggest that Jess Phillips was in league with ‘Islamist thugs’ and should not be minister for safeguarding women and girls. This tweet was clearly intended to reach the attention of the World’s Richest Man, and it succeeded: Musk retweeted Truss’s disgraceful slur with the comment ‘She [Phillips] should be in prison.’

Well done Liz! Go you!

Meanwhile, in the mother of parliaments, Kemi Badenough called for a national inquiry into grooming gangs, even though neither she nor her government had implemented made in the last one, when it actually had the chance to do so. Alexis Jay has herself rejected these calls for a national inquiry, and said that the government should implement the reforms her inquiry recommended.

But like Furedi and all the others, Badenough knows what Elon Musk knows. And so she tried to undermine Starmer while, Farage and Tice chortled on the backbenches, and Rupert Lowelife brayed about deporting all ‘guilty foreign nationals’ and their family members.

There might once have have been a time when you could look at your political opponents and think that perhaps they had a different ideological take on a common problem that was at least worthy of consideration, even if you didn’t agree with them. That cannot be said of Rupert Lowelife’s depiction of the ‘mass rape of young white working-class girls by gangs of Pakistani rapists’ as a ‘rotting stain on our nation’.

Such claims are not intended to bring justice to the victims. They are not intended to widen understanding of why these crimes occur, enhance the safeguarding of children or develop policies to address historic failures in responding to these crimes. The immediate goal of Musk, Furedi, Lowlife and all the others is to use these crimes to attack the Labour government. In the longer term, they seek to build on the summer’s riots, whip up more hatred toward (dark-skinned) immigrants, and call the whole idea of a multi-cultural society into question, until we reach the point when ‘remigration’ becomes not only desirable but even essential.

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Trump also plays this game, in his constant depictions of Latino immigrants as murderers and rapists. Yet according to an article on GB News by Spectator writer and Bruges Group luminary Lee Cohen:

For Trump’s America, the grooming gang scandal signals a moral and ethical decline in British leadership…The US values strong, principled allies—nations that uphold the rule of law and safeguard the welfare of their citizens.

This is where satire crawls into a ditch to die like a dog. The figurehead of ‘Trump’s America’ is a convicted felon and rapist, with close and long-demonstrated links to the serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Just today, the US Department of Justice released a report claiming that Trump would have been convicted of criminal behaviour for trying to overturn the 2020 election.

So much for morality and ethics.

And as for children’s safety, last year Trump appointed a paedophile and sex trafficker as his Attorney General, who very nearly got the job. Musk’s concern for working class (white) girls doesn’t extend to the victims of these crimes, nor is his outrage directed at their perpetrators.

The same can be said about so many of those who are following his lead. To his credit, Starmer has finally attempted to push back against what he called the ‘lies and misinformation’ on this issue, instead of trying to mollify the man responsible for it. Starmer didn’t mention Musk’s name directly, when he said that the people making these accusations are ‘in victims, they’re interested in themselves.’

This is entirely right. The crimes are bad enough, without the World’s Richest Man and his acolytes using them to fuel their dark agendas or further their disreputable careers. It’s a sordid game, best-played in the gutter, and that is the zone that Musk and his pals inhabit as they poison society one drop at a time, in the hope that they will benefit from it.

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No True Science

I’m not a particular fan of vampire movies. My youthful enthusiasm for the Hammer horror films of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing had long since receded by the time the Twilight trilogy and other twenty-first century variations on the bloodsucker genre came along. Nevertheless, I do appreciate the Gothic. I once spent a fabulously atmospheric evening in an old monastery-cum-guest house in Cuenca, curled up in bed reading Matthew Lewis’s torrid eighteenth century melodrama The Monk - call it method reading.

Lewis’ mad novel was one the building blocks of the Gothic tradition that includes Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla, Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, the paintings of Goya and Henry Fuseli, Hammer horror films, Black Sabbath’s album covers and Ann Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. The trailer of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu remake enticed me to the cinema for the first time in 2025, because it seemed to have all the essential elements of the Gothic genre stamped all over it.

The film didn’t disappoint. Mannered histrionic acting; Tim Burtonesque hyper-real fairy tale sets; a hulking blood-drinking demon speaking ‘ancient Dacian’ in a voice to peel the paint off walls; driverless carriages on lonely roads; wild-eyed superstitious villagers; a pervasive atmosphere of dread and an imperilled heroine whose body becomes the battleground between good and evil - Nosferatu is the full Gothic. It gleefully recaptures the somnambulistic nightmarish quality of Murnau’s 1922 original, and (this is the twenty-first century after all), ramps up the already-overwrought sexual hysteria and melodrama of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, while thankfully leaving aside the antisemitic tropes that featured in both Stoker’s novel and the movie that it pays homage to.

Eggers’ vampire-demon, the Count of Orlok, emanates from some dark, almost primeval corner of Eastern Europe, but he also inhabits a non-spatial fifth dimension and sends telepathic messages of dominance and submission that penetrate the dreams of his victims and servants long before he sees them.

Like so many of its predecessors, it is barking nonsense, which requires a complete suspension of disbelief to accept even its basic premises. But the fascination of the Gothic has never been due to the genre’s socioeconomic precision or plausible plotlines. It’s not for nothing that the golden age of the genre coincided with the highwatermark of the scientific revolution at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.

This was an era in which, as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, ‘the use and celebration of reason, the power by which humans understand the universe and improve their own condition,’ were central to Enlightenment thought, and ‘The goals of rational humanity were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness.’

Practitioners of the Gothic took a different view. They dwelt in the shadows not the light. In their stories and visions, reason struggles to prevail against darker human instincts and more powerful forces emanating from beyond the human.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a scientist’s quest for knowledge for its own sake - the quintessential Enlightenment pursuit - leads him to create a monster that destroys him and everyone he loves. Matthew Lewis’s monk rapes his drugged lover in a crypt, murders her mother, dabbles in sorcery and then sells his soul to the devil. Goya’s sleeping writer falls into daydreams inhabited by freakish starey-eyed birds and monstrous apparitions. And Dracula exerts a mesmerising seductive power over women who are half-complicit in their own downfall. It’s not exactly a blueprint for a better world.

If the Gothic was the dark side of romanticism, it also hearkened back to a pre-Enlightenment era in which ‘the use and celebration of reason’ was not the dominant ethos in society, when was entirely normal to believe in demons that feasted on human blood, in witches’ spells that caused crops to fail, the deaths of children, and other tragedies and calamities.

Witchcraft was only one of many superstitions that Enlightenment scholars and their descendants believed would gradually disappear through the diffusion of scientific knowledge and education. Gothic writers and artists saw things differently. They may not have been psychoanalysts, but they recognized, as psychoanalysis later did, that goodness and virtue did not necessarily come naturally, and that there were elements within the human psyche that could not easily be removed through reason and scientific advancement.

The Enlightenment is often imagined as a kind of universal threshold - an unstoppable process that transformed humanity’s view of itself and of nature forever. Nosferatu refers to these assumptions. When the disgraced occultist Von Franz is challenged by a nineteenth century medical doctor about his belief in ‘medievial devilry’, he replies:

I have seen things in this world that would have made Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother’s womb. We have not become so enlightened as we have been blinded by the gaseous light of science. I have wrestled with the Devil as Jacob wrestled the angel in Peniel and I tell you, if we are to tame darkness, we must first face that it exists. Meine Herren, we are here encountering the undead plague carrier…the Vampyr…Nosferatu.

In an age of artificial intelligence, tech-driven information, mobile phones, satellites, and unmanned aerial vehicles, and a thousand other technological achievements that were made possible through science, reason, and empirical inquiry, Von Franz’s words ought to seem as quaint and anachronistic to us as they do to his astounded listeners. And yet we live in a century in which millions of QAnon conspiracists believe that Satan-worshipping celebrities are murdering children in order to harvest adrenochrome from their brains and attain eternal youth.

One of these believers shot up a pizza parlour in Washington in order to rescue children from a basement - a dim and foolhardy act of altruism that only came to an end when he found that there were no children and no basement. In December 2020, a former information consultant named Anthony Quinn Warner died in the explosion that he set off outside the AT&T building in Nashville. According to NBC, Warner may have subscribed to an internet conspiracy in which

politicians and other prominent people, including the Clintons and the comedian Bob Hope, who died in 2003, are actually lizard-like creatures sent to Earth and are responsible for a number of historic tragedies. Justin Bieber and the Obamas have also been named in the conspiracy theory.

Put these ingredients together and vampires don’t seem that outlandish. According to a 2021 YouGov poll, only thirteen percent of Americans believe that vampires are real, but forty-three percent believe that demons exist. As Leonardo da Vinci might have said, this is not true science. It was only last year that the ridiculous white supremacist fraud Tucker Carlson claimed to have found bite marks on his body, supposedly inflicted on him by a demon while his wife was sleeping.

Even if Carlson didn’t believe that this really happened, you can bet that many people did. And as easy as it is to mock this dizzy crackpotism, it’s worth remembering that it can have real-world consequences. Because if you can believe that demons gnaw on tv presenters, or that Tom Hanks and Ellen DeGeneres are cannibals, you won’t have much trouble accepting, for example, that the Democrats fixed the 2020 election, that liberals are trying to ‘replace’ the white race, or that ‘15-minute cities’ are intended to strip you of your material goods and trap you in a ghetto.

Nazism exploited a similar credulity, and propagated its own conspiracies and occult obsessions, whether pursuing crazed racial origins theories in the Arctic or the Pyrenees, or fusing medieval blood libel fantasies of Jews drinking children’s blood into twentieth century imagery of the vampiric Jew.

QAnon’s X-File pop culture kitsch has echoes of this same tradition; its cannibal elite conspiracies exploit real-world distrust of governments and institutions in order to create an epistemological crazytown in which anything that can be believed, will be believed, and spread through a culture that too often prioritises entertaining fantasies over knowledge and critical thinking.

These tendencies were often morbidly present during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Where uneducated seventeenth century peasants once believed that harmless widows and single women from their village were cavorting with Satan in order to make them ill or cause their crops to wilt, millions of people in Europe and America came to believe that COVID-19 was spread by mobile phone antennae. The fact that most of these people had been to school and may even have been to university did not prevent them from believing that global ‘elites’ had deliberately spread COVID-19 through 5G electromagnetic rays.

A 2021 survey of ‘radiophobic’ COVID-19 conspiracy theories, found theories that extended across a broad spectrum. Some of their believers thought that 5G weakens the immune system; others thought that it infected people directly, or caused symptoms that simulate viral infection. And there were also those who believed that before COVID-19, mobile towers caused SARS, and 4G Swine Flu. The survey’s authors noted that

In all iterations, 5G is depicted as either “Satan’s strategy” to advance the apocalypse, or the work of a techno-capitalist government cabal that seeks to reduce the population, profit from a vaccine, or embed micro-chips into the vaccine for the purposes of surveillance or control.

This is not quite naked witches flying off on broomsticks to cavort with the horned beast, but it is not the most plausible explanation of how viruses are passed from human to human. In the twenty-first century, as in the seventeenth, malign conspiracies explain natural tragedies and calamities, but now technology, science and medicine, rather than the natural world, are depicted as expressions of dark magic, operated by shadowy malign forces, in which viruses can be spread through mobile electromagnetic frequencies, and vaccines plant micro-chips in the brain and body..

Even in our age of cities, machines and material comforts, such conspiracies can be more comforting and appealing than the recognition that human beings remain vulnerable organisms that are as susceptible to viruses and infections as we have always been. Yet ask Google ‘did Satan cause the COVID-19 virus’ and you will find yourself exposed to ideas and debates that would not have seemed entirely unfamiliar to the witchfinder generals, lawyers and inquisitors of the seventeenth century.

Some Christians are unsure whether Covid-19 is the work of God or the work of Satan, or whether the Pandemic was in fact God’s ‘judgment against humanity’. Others, such as the South African Chief Justice, wonder whether the COVID-19 vaccine was intended to ‘advance a Satanic agenda of the mark of the beast.’

Despite - and to some extent because of - the technological progress we have made, the inhabitants of our media-saturated world often appear strikingly amenable to pseudo-explanations that Voltaire and Diderot would have scorned. This willingness is even more striking and anomalous now that it was in the past, because there are more scientific explanations available for the processes that these theories supposedly describe, and such information is more readily available.

But the extraordinary popular delusions and madness of twenty-first century digital crowds are as impervious to reason as those of their predecessors. In our anxious times, whole swathes of the population appear willing to suspend disbelief and accept explanations and theories that make no sense, that solve nothing, and cure nothing, and many seem to prefer to do this, rather than engage with informed knowledge and expertise.

There is a grim irony that this collective descent into stupidity and superstition should be taking place at precisely the point when artificial intelligence is poised to undermine humanity’s ability to think for itself. Because the world is not a vampire movie or a Netflix series. No demons or monsters - no matter how vividly and compellingly imagined - can match the banal malevolence of our contemporary monsters, snake oil salesmen, megalomaniacs and would-be dictators who infest our rotten politics and decaying societies.

It may be comforting to believe that plagues are caused by electromagnetic rays, and that the powerful drink the blood of children. But none of this will help prevent the next pandemic. Fantasies about satanic cabals and red pills will not shed any light on the actual structures and forces that are draining democracies across the world of their ability to make the world a better place, or ensure our collective survival.

These forces are far more threatening than anything in Nosferatu. They cannot be vanquished by exposure to daylight or a stake in the heart, but only through the more complex task of building a future that reflects our best dreams, ideas and aspirations, rather than our nightmares.

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Happy New Year

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History, wrote James Joyce, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. I’m still in the liminal period between Christmas and the New Year, and I have to say that politically-speaking, 2025 does not look promising, so I am not yet ready to put my head above the parapet just yet. And so I thought I would bring the New Year in with this nightmare, which I wrote on my old blog in February 2016. Even then, the essential cruelty of Trump and his movement was clear, but despite Hilary Clinton’s manifest shortcomings, I only half-believed that America would be mad enough and bad enough to vote for the gilded monstrosity.

Of course it did, and tragically, incredibly, disgracefully, it’s about to come true a second time nine years later. So much more is known about Trump than was known back in 2016 (which was already bad enough). Back then, he wasn’t known to be a rapist, a convicted felon and an insurrectionist. Now he is, and more than seventy million Americans didn’t care, and to some extent we will all be living in the abyss that these voters have dragged their country into.

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So steel yourselves, readers. Find hope, pleasure, comfort and solidarity where you can, because apart from the fact that MAGA is already tearing itself to pieces, there is nothing hopeful or inspirational in what is about to unfold.

FIONA BRUCE: And now we cut to the White House to hear our political editor Laura Kuenssberg cover Donald Trump’s inaugural speech. Laura, can you tell us what’s happening?

KUENSSBERG: Well Fiona, we are really witnessing some extraordinary scenes here on what is truly a momentous occasion.

(Camera pans out to the White House, which has been painted orange. Tens of thousands of people with dyed orange hair are waiting expectantly. Drones fly overhead. Searchlights play across the night sky. In front of the White House a group of men and women are kicking a Mexican to death. )

KUENSSBERG: Hillary Clinton has conceded defeat and said that she accepts the will of the American people, and now the whole world is waiting to hear the inaugural speech from a man who has deed all expectations to become the forty-fifth president of America. And here he is!

(Camera cuts to White House. Strains of the Star-Spangled Banner. Donald J. Trump appears wearing a tuxedo, holding hands with Melania Trump, who blows kisses to the camera. Vice President Sarah Palin is standing beside them, wearing a safari jacket and holding an automatic rifle. Grown men fall weeping to the ground. Women writhe and speak in tongues. Snake handlers play with rattlesnakes. No one is bitten. Trump raises two fists and punches the sky. The crowd does the same. Vice President Palin fires a burst into the air. Accidentally shoots a low-flying drone which crashes into the crowd. )

TRUMP: My fellow Americans! I feel your pain! I share your rage! I lick your spittle! I am Trump!

CROWD: Trump! Trump! Trump!

TRUMP: Hey security, how’d the cripple in the back row get in here? Yeah, the mongoloid. God I want to punch that guy in the face. Isn’t my wife beautiful? Isn’t she beautiful? I love beauty!

CROWD: Me-la-nia! Me-la-nia!

TRUMP: And I will not tolerate ugliness in America! I told you I would win, and I won!

CROWD: Win! Win! Win!

TRUMP: I told you I would whip those pussies and I whipped them! And let me tell you people, if I win, America wins, and if America wins the whole world wins. And if I say I will bring all jobs back to America, then I will. Because I know what jobs are. I hire people. I am not hired. I am Trump. Other politicians are bought, but I buy. Other politicians stay in hotels. I own Las Vegas!

CROWD: Las Vegas! Las Vegas!

TRUMP: Other politicians get money from corporations. I am a corporation. I am money. I am Trump!

CROWD: Trump! Trump! Trump!

LONE VOICE: Liar!

TRUMP: Who said that? Man, I want to punch that guy in the face. Get him out of here! (Security drag away heckler. Some members of the crowd pull him away and kick him to death)

CROWD: Kill! Kill! Kill!

TRUMP: I told you I would build a WALL and I will build a WALL! Because I am a BUILDER and BUILDERS build WALLS! And who will pay for it?

CROWD: Mexico!

TRUMP: And I promise you that tomorrow we will start to build that WALL, and 12 million rapists and thieves are going back to where they came from. And where will we send them?

CROWD: To Mexico! To Mexico!

TRUMP: And I promise you my fellow Americans that you will be safe behind that WALL! And you will be rich behind that WALL! And I say to you, no more Muslims will be coming through that WALL! Because America is a Christian country and I am your own personal Jesus and the Pope is not a Christian and I want to punch him in the face!

CROWD: In the face! In the face!

TRUMP: I will punch ISIS in the face. I will bring back thumbscrews. I will bring back the rack. And I want to tell you that Special Forces have captured 49 members of Islamic State and they will be waterboarded on prime time news tomorrow and they will be shot with bullets dipped in pig fat. And if any of those ragheads even thinks about hurting another American, I will turn their cities into carparks with nukes wrapped in bacon! I will kill their families and the ancestors of their families and their household pets!

SARAH PALIN: Kick! ISIS! Ass! (Fires off another burst)

CROWD: Kill! Kill! Kill! TRUMP: And I promise you that America will be great again! As great as I am! Because I am Trump!

CROWD: Trump! Trump! Trump!

TRUMP: I will make it rain in California!. I will heal the sick! I will make the lame walk! I will make every poor man rich! I will turn your money green! I will give you more money than Donald J. Trump has ever seen. No more big government! No more rotten politicians! No more welfare! No more taxes! Free ice cream!

CROWD: Free ice cream! Free ice cream!

TRUMP: So let my orange hair be a candle in the darkness. Let me be your fluorescent tangerine dream. Let my balls be your balls. God bless America and anyone who has anything to say about that, just let him come here and I will punch him in the face!

(Trump bends Melania over backwards and takes her in a long lingering kiss to the strains of the Beatles’ Revolution. Sarah Palin fires off another burst from her rifle and accidentally shoots one of the security snipers off a rooftop. Some members of the crowd spot a woman in a hijab and pull it off and begin beating her to death. Fighter planes carve out the shape of Donald Trump’s head in smoke trails in the sky. Trump and Melania walk back into the White House. Cut to a smiling Laura Kuenssberg, standing beside an Abba tribute band singing ‘money, money, money, must be funny, in a rich man’s world.’ )

KUENSSBERG: Well Fiona, I don’t think anyone here tonight will ever forget it!

CROWD: U.S.A! U.S.A!

(Camera returns to studio).

Cut.

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Shame

Portrait of Gisèle Pelicot by Ann-Sophie Qvarnström. Creative Commons License

I recently watched the Egyptian filmmaker Ibrahim Nash'at’s brilliant documentary Hollywoodgate, about Afghanistan under the Taliban. Nash’at was allowed by the Taliban leadership to film the first weeks of Taliban rule following the NATO withdrawal in 2020, on condition that he only filmed what the Taliban permitted. Not surprisingly, women are almost entirely absent, except for the few chilling glimpses of burka-clad women begging in the middle of Kabul streets, who Nash’at was able to film surreptitiously.

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In Afghanistan, women have become shadows and ghosts. Not only are they physically invisible, but the ‘Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice’ has recently banned them from ‘singing, reciting, or reading aloud in public.’ Afghan women cannot be seen or heard, but they can be raped and tortured if they break any of the Taliban’s decrees, or try to uphold women’s rights in a country where women have no rights.

Like Islamic State, or the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, or Boko Haram, Taliban prison guards rape female prisoners because that is what holy warriors in the path of God tell themselves they are allowed to do, and they also rape in the knowledge that they will always get away with it. This is a country where shame is reserved for the victims not the perpetrators. In 2010, a ten year old girl raped by a local mullah was at risk of an ‘honour’ killing by her family and community members for having brought ‘shame’ on her family. According to Heather Barr, associate director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch:

The Taliban are aware of how much stigma is involved around the issue of sexual violence in Afghanistan and how incredibly difficult – and usually impossible – it is for victims of sexual violence to come forward and tell their stories, even sometimes to their own families, because there is a risk of shame and potentially ‘honour’ violence.

Much of the world rightly looks on such practices with horror and disgust. But Afghanistan is not the only country where shame is reserved for the female victims of rape, rather than the male perpetrators. In 2016, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported that 35.6 per cent of women worldwide have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence. In 2010, UNICEF found that around 120 million girls worldwide under the age of 20 had experienced ‘forced intercourse or other forced sexual acts’ at some point in their lives.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, where militias engage in what Human Rights Watch called ‘horrific levels of rape’ and other forms of sexual violence, most rapes are not reported because of the fear of social stigmatisation and the belief that women are responsible for ‘provoking’ their (armed) rapists.

In India, 31,000 cases of rape were reported by the government in 2022: that is, 85 rapes daily. Many other cases are not reported, in part, according to Mariam Dhawale, the secretary of the All India Democratic Women’s Association, because

Often, the victims are victimized further with insults, and it makes it very difficult for them to report the crime to the police. In such cases, women think it is best to keep quiet.

A 2024 public health study of rape survivors in South Africa (40,000 reported annual rapes over the last decade), found that women survivors were subject to ‘internalized stigma, shame and self-blame’, in a society where ‘rape myths’ include the following:

…that rape is driven by women dressing a certain way or being visibly drunk, women are ‘accidently’ raped because they ‘play hard to get’, rape is about men’s need for sex, and rapists are always strangers

Such myths are not unique to South Africa. Shame amongst female rape survivors is a ubiquitous phenomenon, even in countries that think themselves more enlightened in such matters. In the UK, 1 in 4 women aged 16 or over have been raped or sexually assaulted. From 1st July 2023 to 30th June 2024, 69,184 rapes were recorded by police, out of which charges have been brought in just 2.7 percent of cases. According to the Rape Crisis National Service, 5 in 6 female victims in this period did no go to the police; 40 percent of survivors claimed ‘embarrassment’ and another 34 percent said they thought it would be ‘humiliating.’

Some cases do become public. In the last two weeks, a man was found guilty of repeatedly raping and then killing an unconscious NHS worker in a London park. In Hertfordshire, a man went on trial for allegedly killing three women with a crossbow, one of whom was his former lover, who he admitted to raping. In Rotherham, two brothers were found guilty of rape as part of the police’s ongoing Operation Stovewood investigation into historic sex abuse.

You probably won’t have heard of the last two - and you certainly won’t have heard of them from the far-right defenders of ‘our’ women, because the two brothers were white, and therefore not politically useful pawns in racist patriot games. But women can be raped by anybody, and whenever this happens, they have to cross the barriers of shame, suspicion and stigmatisation that exist to a greater or lesser extent in almost every part of the world, in order to have even a chance of finding justice.

It is horrifying how normalised this is. Rape is often passed off as a ‘weapon of war’ - the supposed product of some exceptional lowering of the moral barriers that wartime stress brings out in young men. When the future Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas complained to Stalin about the rapes Russians had committed in the Yugoslavia they were supposedly liberating in World War II, Stalin replied, ‘Can’t you understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?’

Whether rape in wartime is rationalised as revenge and punishment, or ‘having fun’, it may also be simply taking advantage of an opportunity. Because rape is also a constant component of the social fabric even in peacetime.

Men and boys can be raped too, but women are faraway the most likely victims. Wherever they are, and whoever they are, women face the constant and pervasive threat of sexual violence. Men and boys can be killed and attacked by random strangers for a variety of reasons, but women and young girls are generally attacked by men for one reason only. As a result they must always be careful about where they walk, when they go running in the park or go out at night, about who they look at, and who comes too close to them.

This general condition is entirely routinised. Every parent with a daughter knows this. It’s the same in almost any country, anywhere, in a world where too many men still do not see women as fully human, let alone as fully equal, and view women through a prism of fear and hatred, domination and submission.

Rape - and the ‘right’ to rape, is just one consequence of this generalised misogyny that remains the scourge and shame of our species - and of the male gender. And yet in country after country, female victims of rape are the ones who have to overcome the stigma of shame in order to have even the possibility of achieving justice.

Monsieur Tout Le Monde

All of which brings us to the horrific crimes of ‘Monsieur Tout Le Monde’ - Mr Everyman - revealed in the largest and most shocking rape trial in French history. As much of the world now knows, the 72-year-old pensioner Gisèle Pelicot was married for more than twenty years to a man who drugged and raped her and invited other men to rape her while she was unconscious in her own home, over a ten-year period.

Domestic rape in itself is not unusual. Rape is not limited to guardians of religious virtue, soldiers, or random predators. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, 8 out of 10 perpetrators are likely to be known to the victim. Some of the men Madame Pelicot’s husband invited in to rape his wife actually knew her, and said hello to her in the street when she went out to buy bread or go shopping, not knowing what had happened.

And yet, in some secret rancid part of themselves, all these men, like her husband, believed that her body existed for their perverse ‘pleasure’.

Faced with such systematic depravity and betrayal, it would have been entirely understandable if Madame Pelicot had chosen to remain anonymous, as so many other victims have done before her.

Instead, she chose to go public. She attended the trial day after day, in the presence of her husband and his fellow-rapists. Plunged into in a 21st century provincial de Sadeian hell, in which she was ‘sacrificed on the altar of vice,’ as she put it, she made the conscious decision to place the shame and the humiliation on the men who had raped and assaulted her, rather than accept it for herself.

She did this day after day, with a quiet determination, dignity and courage that reminds you why humanity is worth fighting for, and justice is worth striving for. In doing so, she won a victory that was not just hers. In court, she wore a scarf designed by the Aboriginal artist Mulyatingki Marney, given to her by Australia’s Older Women Network, because, according to its president ‘A scarf is like a hug…It’s draped around your neck and it hangs close to your heart.’

In her closing speech, with her grandson on her arm she calmly told the world:

I wanted, by opening the doors of this trial on September 2, that society could take hold of the debates that took place there. I have never regretted this decision. I now have confidence in our ability to collectively seize a future in which each woman and man can live in harmony with respect and mutual understanding.

We are still very far from that. In the United States, millions of Americans have just voted for a man known to be a rapist and a sexual predator, a man who was one of Jeffrey Epstein’s closest associates. Since then, Trump has appointed at least four men to high office with accusations of rape and/or paedophilia attached to their names. All this, after having vowed to be a protector of women ‘whether they like it or not.’

This convergence of extreme right politics and toxic hypermasculinity is not an accident. As Talia Lavin has written, this was a ‘rape culture election’ in which white nationalists told women to ‘get back in the kitchen’ and jeered ‘your body, my choice’ to celebrate further limitations on abortion rights. Like the Taliban, these valiant Christian knights obsess about women, and assume for themselves absolute ownership of women’s bodies.

Despite decades of feminism, women’s rights activism and the Me Too movement, we are in a world in which ‘incels’ believe they have the right to kill ‘hot’ women who won’t have sex with them; in which rapists like Russell Brand and Andrew Tate are ‘influencers’ with millions of followers, and a rapist can be elected president.

Two women have told the BBC how Tate strangled and raped them, including one incident in which Tate left a voice message afterwards, declaring:

‘Am I a bad person? Because the more you didn’t like it, the more I enjoyed it,’

The answer to that ought to be an unequivocal yes, because Tate is a very bad person indeed. As Coventry Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre (CRASAC) pointed out, following his arrest in January 2023, ‘by using the cover of lifestyle advice, fame and fast cars he has built up a huge following in order to push his misogynistic and dangerous view towards women and girls.’

And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that millions of young men not only don’t care that Tate is a vicious misoygynist and an alleged rapist and sex trafficker, they want to be like him, just as millions envy the poisonous rapist who will be entering the White House next month - the same rapist who the UK government is reportedly preparing to invite for a state visit, by the way.

The Coventry Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre have located ‘a culture of rape and sexual abuse’ as part of a ‘pyramid which begins with sexist, objectifying “jokes” and harassment. When our society tolerates attitudes at this level it has the effect of trivialising sexual violence and abuse.’

This is where we have been for a long time, and the election of Donald Trump - and the grotesque fawning over him - is just one more symptom of this toleration and trivialisation. And this is one more reason, why men and women of goodwill should take heart and inspiration from Madame Pelicot’s determination to ensure that ‘shame changes sides’.

She, not Donald Trump, should have been ‘person of the year’ on Time’s front cover. And just because Time, like so many others, preferred the rapist, does not mean that we are all obliged to do the same. Because when a woman shows the courage that Gisèle Pelicot has demonstrated over the last few months, then she - not the rapist - should be the object of our admiration. She should be the one who galvanises all those who believe that this world should be so much better than it is.

And the world will never be as good as it should be until women, wherever they are, can feel safe in the streets and in their homes, and the perpetrators, not the victims of sexual violence become the ones who, like ‘Monsieur Tout Le Monde’, must sit in court and feel shame.

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Trump's Billionaire Ball

It’s the season of goodwill to all men, when those who have a lot are invited, like Scrooge, to make common cause with those who have nothing or very little. But as the world braces itself for the Trumpocalypse in three weeks time, there are those who have more than many humans have ever had in the whole of human history, who remain untouched by the milk of human kindness.

Take the World’s Richest Man. Earlier this month the self-styled ‘Dark Gothic MAGA’ took time out to opine on some of the less-favoured residents of his adoptive country:

This is not the first time Rocket Ozymandias has offered the world his pearls of wisdom on the subject of homelessness. In June this year, he made another typically insightful, knowledgeable and measured contribution to the debate:

In January 2023, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reported that over 650,000 extremely drug-addicted and mentally zombified Americans were likely to be homeless on any given night. OK, HUD didn’t put it in quite those terms. The agency attributed the rise in homelessness to a number of factors including the COVID-19 pandemic, an opioid epidemic, and a nationwide affordable housing crisis, all of which had ‘conspired to make attaining and maintaining housing increasingly difficult for many low-income households.’

But that’s not a lens the World’s Richest Man and his pals like to look through. Because such an analysis raises a number of troubling societal questions relating to inequality and the American economic model that might reflect badly on the beneficiaries of that model.

Far better to associate homeless people with ‘violent drug zombies with dead eyes, and needles and human feces on the street,’ as the repellent white supremacist shill Kremlin Tucker Carlson did in October. Because if it’s true, as Donald Trump himself argued last year that, ‘Our once-great cities have become unliveable, unsanitary nightmares, surrendered to the homeless, the drug addicted, and the violent and dangerously deranged,’ then the only problem you have is how to get these degenerates off the streets.

This is what Joe Lonsdale – the co-founder of tech firm Palantir and and head of a Trump super PAC – did in Austin, Texas, when he helped finance a referendum calling for a ban on homeless encampments in 2021. Austin’s elite pitched in $1.9 million into the campaign for Proposition B. Since then, more than – more than 900 citations have been issued in Austin for sleeping, lying down or pitching a tent in the city. Lonsdale has since founded and funded a thinktank to promote similar policies in other states, and succeeded in getting the support of the Supreme Court for the criminalisation of homelessness.

In a twenty-first century version of A Christmas Carol, you could imagine a ketamine-adled billionaire stumbling through the streets of San Francisco, where he encounters three ghosts who lead him back to charity and humanity. This heart-warming show would culminate in a scene in which said billionaire hosts a Christmas dinner for the homeless in a glass house, and everyone sings ‘for he’s a jolly good fellow’ as our billionaire-protagonist finally discovers that money isn’t everything.

But in the real world of Trump’s America, where money walks and bullshit talks, the fetid stench of the Mar a Lago swamp wafts through penthouses, mansions and government departments, and the fact that the richest man in the history of humanity is viciously attacking and dehumanizing homeless people is just one more symptom of the disease America is suffering from.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates describes oligarchy as a form of government in which ‘men become lovers of trade and money; they honour and look up to the rich man, and make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man.’ In a society in which ‘the great mass of the citizens become lovers of money,’ Socrates argued, ‘the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls.’

Trump’s America is an almost too perfect manifestation of this dynamic. His cabinet includes eleven billionaires and assorted multi-millionaires. Another two - Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy - have been tasked with heading a non-government agency that will, according to Musk, enable the US government to ‘reduce spending to live within our means.’

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Who better than a billionaire - who may become the world’s first trillionaire - to tell a country how to live within its means? And if you were that man, dreaming of rockets, Mars, and driverless cars, would you want to find zombified drug addicts loitering outside your San Francisco office when the chauffeur dropped you off in the morning?

You know you wouldn’t.

And so Musk and his cohorts, and the president who brought them into his government, and the media and the movement that scandalously brought that president into the White House have added the homeless to their list of people to be persecuted and victimized.

They have embraced social cruelty with the same fervour that Scrooge once demonstrated towards his money, only unlike Dickens’s miser, they will not get over it, and the ghosts of Christmas will not redeem them.

Because these are men and women with dreams too great for ordinary mortals to comprehend, in a country where moral value is measured by net worth. Gods in the cult of money, following decades of unrestricted and unregulated accumulation of wealth, they dream of outliving their natural lifespan and perpetuating themselves into the near future, of establishing colonies on Mars, or deploying soldiers in space to defend US economic interests.

As the president-elect himself has shown many, many times, immense wealth does not bring honour or virtue, and the same can be said of his cronies and appointees Before he was pardoned by Trump and made US ambassador to France, Charles Kushner was convicted on 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering - the last of which involved hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law in order to intimidate his own sister.

Musk is a proven liar and a dangerous one. At least three of his companies - Tesla, X and SpaceX - are under investigation for alleged misconduct by at least nine government departments, some of which will come under the purview of his new government-cutting agency.

This whiff of sleaze and criminality has not prevented governments and politicians from fawning on Musk like some ancient potentate. In the last few weeks billionaires have also grovelled before Trump and his government of billionaires. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Patrick Soon-Schiong, Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel - all hail to the rapist criminal who tried to overthrow his government.

The billionaires outside the government have one thing in common, apart from their wealth, with those who are inside it - they all want absolute freedom to live in a world where they can do whatever they want to do without regulation and preferably without taxation.

But isn’t Bill Gates different from Elon Musk? Isn’t he the nice philanthropist who wants to cure malaria and reduce world poverty?

The problem isn’t whether these men are individually good or bad, or whether they have done good things or not with their wealth. Some have, some haven’t. The point is that no one should have the money they have, and no one who has that money should have the power they have.

Billionaires should not be worshipped. Wealth should not be worshipped, because the interests of billionaires are not synonymous with the interests of society. And countries that value the common good, and their democratic survival, should not be so stupid, cowardly and politically inept, to allow such men to dictate to their governments what they can and can’t do.

But hasn’t American politics always been rotten with money, and susceptible to the rich men with enough money to lobby politicians and shape political outcomes?

Yes, but what is happening now is something new. This is America’s first government of billionaires, governing in the interests of billionaires, regardless of whether these interests clash with the office they hold.

Now these men hold America in thrall, and no wonder Bezos and co are grovelling before the felon who appointed them.

Many years ago Abraham Lincoln denounced the ‘money powers [that] prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity,’ which had profited from the civil war. For Lincoln this power was ‘more despotic than a monarch, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy.’

In an era in which ‘corporations have been enthroned,’ Lincoln predicted that ‘ an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.’

That moment has now arrived. And it remains to be seen whether the American republic survives the insolence of money over the next four years.

So Merry Christmas to all. And then get strapped in, because there will be turbulence, and Americans are not the only ones who will experience it.

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Slouching Towards Farageland

It’s June 2029 and the rally at the O2 Arena to celebrate the Tory/Reform coalition’s victory in the British elections is in full swing. Throughout the evening, the audience has heard tributes from US president JD Vance, from Gert Wilders, Alison Pearson, Viktor Orban, Tim Montgomerie, Andrew Tate, and Georgia Meloni.

Now Nigel Farage bounds onto the stage in a striped jacket and yachting shoes, accompanied by Reform’s main donor Elon Musk. The crowd goes wild and waves glow candles to the sound of Dambusters, as balloons rain down from the ceiling. ‘They used to laugh, they’re not laughing now, are they?’ says Nigel, raising a pint. The crowd cheers. Ni-gel! Ni-gel! They roar.

What a moment, says a beaming Laura Kuenssberg, from the sidelines. This is the point when the British two-party system has finally crumbled. And now the crowd falls silent. It’s like a congregation in a cathedral as the great man spells out the program that will Make Britain Great Again. Mass deportations of tens of thousands of immigrants! Leave the ECHR! Send refugees and asylum seekers back to France! No funding to woke universities and nimby pimby courses! No foreign languages on our streets! No woke teachers in our schools!

The man who once boasted that he has got ‘so many women pregnant’ and criticized the ‘lunacy’ of maternity leave, promises to curtail abortion rights. No namby pamby nanny eurostate red tape!

The crowd roars its approval. Because the crowd is the lion, and the lion has awoken. Across the nation, torchlight parades…all right, I’ll stop. You may be tempted to dismiss this scenario as a crazed episode of Years and Years. You might argue that Farage just a cheap political grifter and a snake oil merchant, who, like Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has stood beneath the window of the electorate singing ‘with feigning voice verses of feigning love/And stol’n the impression of (their) fantasy.’

I recognize that love is not the point here. Farage’s is a message of resentment, grievance and hatred, of sour imperial nostalgia marinated in ethnonationalism, racism and xenophobia, all lubricated with money from dubious sources. Farage is a wrecker, a cynical and cunning disruptor who has prospered in an era dominated by weak, ineffectual and often downright useless politicians, and an equally gormless media.

If this country was ever foolish enough to put him any closer to power than he already is, then the results are likely to be as calamitous for the UK as Trump II is likely to be for America. If you thought Brexit was bad, or Truss and Johnson were bad, a Reform government or even a Conservative-Reform coalition government would be all that, and much, much more.

It would be a government of the absolute worst that the UK has to offer, appealing to the worst and most base sentiments of the British electorate. But if Elon Musk and Trump have their way, Farage will soon be receiving a lot of money, at a delicate moment in British politics. His party is rising in the polls, hard right parties are sweeping the board across the world, and billionaires seem increasingly able to buy the governments they want.

A Reform government would not be a solution to any of the problems that this country faces - some of which Farage has done as much as anyone to worsen. But grievances, not solutions, are the currency of hard-right populism.

These movements offer delusions of cost-free ‘sovereignty’ without any regard for the compromises and commitments that every country is obliged to make in order to exist in the real world. They present voters with a series of spectres: open borders, the deep state, immigrant invasions, tone-deaf liberal elites and woke or globalist conspiracies - and then they promise to burn the straw men they have created.

There was once a time when the prospect of a Farage government would have seemed unimaginable, but in these times the worst possibility can no longer be ruled out, either in this or any other country, and as Brecht said, the one who laughs has not yet heard the bad news.

And remarkably, it’s a possibility that now seems more likely than it was before the last election, as a Labour government that is far more fragile than its majority suggests, continues to stumble repeatedly and struggles to articulate a compelling vision of where it would like to take the country.

This failure is partly that of vision, and it’s also a question of political courage. Some commentators have praised Starmer’s bravery in ‘changing his party’, but there was more than a hint of opportunism rather than courage, in the marginalisation of the Labour left. And having driven the left out of the party and tiptoed into power, essentially by not being the Tories, Starmer and his team now appear to be floundering in the face of multiple attacks.

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In government, Starmer has shown no courage at all, whether in regard to Trump, Israel, Elon Musk or Saudi Arabia, and there are alarming signs that he is preparing to take the low road in regard to the political threat of Faragism. Take his speech on immigration on 28 November. In it, Starmer noted correctly, that contrary to what Brexiters once promised, immigration has risen. At this point, a progressive politician might have used these figures to criticize the dishonesty and incompetence of the politicians who made these claims.

Instead, he said this:

What the British people are owed…is an explanation. Because a failure on this scale isn’t just bad luck. It isn’t a global trend or taking your eye off the ball. No – this a different order of failure. This happened by design, not accident. Policies were reformed deliberately, to liberalise immigration. Brexit was used for that purpose. To turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders. Global Britain – remember that slogan…That is what they meant.

No, ‘they’ definitely did not. Immigration has risen, because the UK economy needs immigration, and because the EU workers who could not longer come to the UK through Freedom of Movement rules were replaced by workers from other parts of the world. So this increase is most definitely not the result of a ‘one-nation experiment in open borders’ - it is a product of the incompetence and unrealistic expectations of those who promised that Brexit would reduce immigration.

Starmer could have made these points, with regard to Farage. But that would require a degree of political courage that he does not have. And so he accused Tory governments of doing what Labour itself was once accused of doing in the Blair/Brown years. Where the rightwing press once accused Labour of an experiment in multiculturalism intended to ‘rub the right’s nose in diversity’, Starmer now makes the nonsensical allegation that Tory governments conducted a ‘one-nation experiment in open borders’, whatever that it is.

Inevitably, Starmer presented immigration as a burden and a problem that his party will ‘fix.’ As if that wasn’t bad enough, he also argued that the UK is ‘hopelessly reliant on immigration’ because of skills shortages (partly true), and also because of the absence of ‘welfare reform’ and the ‘2.8 million people out of work on long-term sickness - a problem ignored, left to fester.’

On and on it went, repeating all the clichés we have come to expect: immigrants abusing the system…soft touch…smashing smuggling gangs…secure our borders.

It was possibly the worst single speech I have ever heard any Labour prime minister give on immigration, and it is very difficult to separate this speech from the pantomime villain of Farage (‘He’s behind you!’).

In effect, Starmer was attempting a card trick that mainstream political parties across the West have tried to play in recent years - defeat the hard-right by borrowing their talking points and framing, and then somehow prove that you are better able to deal with this problem than they are.

There is no evidence that this trick ever impresses the constituencies it is aimed at. On the contrary, it tends to give legitimacy to the political forces it attempts to marginalize. And when these ‘solutions’ fail to materialise, then voters tend to turn to the genuine article - insofar as movements like Reform are ‘genuine’ about anything.

Starmer’s more recent ‘milestones’ speech was equally hollow, full of the kind of clunking clichés, improbable goals, paeans to ‘values’ (a word that really should be banned from political conversation), leaden syntax and shopworn metaphors that make you long for a JB Priestley or just someone who could say what they actually mean and sound as if they actually mean it.

Immigration also featured in these milestones. A boast about deportations of ‘foreign national offenders’ (‘up 29 %’ hurrah!); a pathetic echo of Tory/Trumpite rhetoric about deep state bureaucracies and civil servant 'swamps’ - which translate in Starmerspeak into ‘too many people in Whitehall [are]comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.’

This is a vicious and insulting allegation, and no wonder the civil servants’ unions have criticized Starmer for making it. We expect the likes of Truss and Badenoch to make such claims, but when a Labour government talks like this, it loses what should be its own natural supporters, and it is unlikely to gain long-term support from voters who only turned to Labour because the last few Tory governments have been so unbelievably awful.

I don’t say this with any satisfaction. I’m aware that a concerted attempt is being made across the British right-wing media to destroy the government before it has even begun to establish itself. I want Labour to win a second term, and do something substantial to make this country a better place. But to achieve that, it will have to take on more powerful enemies than the ones Starmer is currently lining up.

It will have to show courage and conviction, political skill and vision. It can’t just cosy up to Trump and turn its back on Europe. It can’t be progressive and also attack immigrants and people on benefits. It may not be politically possible to rejoin the EU, but it can’t turn away from Brexit, and the consequences of Brexit. A government that has no movement to support it cannot live indefinitely on borrowed votes.

And a government that claims to be a government of the centre-left cannot defeat Faragism by dressing up in Faragist drag.

As a new survey by the left-of-centre Compass group has shown, Labour is at much at risk in many marginal constituencies from left and left-of-centre voters as it is from the Reform pseudo-insurgency. If Labour loses the former in an attempt to please Reform voters, its brittle majority will quickly flake away, and it will lose the opportunity that it now has to mount a genuine alternative to the right-wing populist surge.

If that happens, then UK voters may yet decide that they might as well have Farage, and continue the same vertiginous descent that Farage’s buddy is now preparing to inflict on the United States.

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Rome Sweet Rome

As we brace ourselves for the next four years of The Omen franchise to open in Washington in January, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 2 may not register very highly on your hierarchy of things worth paying much attention to. But for twenty-first century culture war sentinels manning the frontiers of anti-wokery, there is no job too small, and everyday is another battle.

Last year it was the John Lewis Christmas advert that roused their righteous indignation. Last month it was the Jaguar ad. And now the World’s Richest Man and self-appointed Lord of the Trolls has turned his attention to Ridley Scott’s latest trip to the Colosseum.

Musk - for it is he of whom I speak - describes himself as a ‘student of history’, which will surprise many people familiar with his endlessly dim pronouncements. Like many men of his political orientation, he also professes to have a particular interest in ancient Rome. In September 2023, he referred to ‘late-stage civilization vibes’ in response to a Tiktok video about how often men spent thinking about the Roman Empire. And in July this year, before Gladiator 2 had even been released, Musk returned to the same theme, in response to a tweet from an anonymous Internet classicist:

‘100 percent’ anti-Western civilization nonsense. And that was just the trailer. And now Musk has seen the film (we suppose) and delivered a damning judgement with the laser-sharp wit for which he is well-known:

Last time I looked, that tweet had 78 million views, which is a lot, considering how stupid it is. I mean seriously, ‘art’ and Elon Musk? And Gladiator 2 doesn’t have much to do with art either. Or ‘woke’ for that matter.

The original Gladiator was one of those rare Hollywood epics in which all its ingredients blend perfectly. A sharp script; terrific performances with characters; a tragic but satisfying revenge theme; battles, fights, intrigue, power, perversion, blood, dust, honour - Gladiator had everything you can expect from a sword and sandals movie. And all of it whirled through Ridley Scott’s directorial mixer to produce a thrilling and irresistible cinematic spectacle .

None of this applies to the sequel. Forbes magazine has dismissed Gladiator 2 as ' a dreadful, pointless sequel that never should have seen the light of day’ - a harsh judgment, but I can see their point. I saw it on the big screen a couple of weeks ago, and unlike the calamitous folly of Napoleon, I didn’t wish I hadn’t seen it.

Once you accept the fact that nothing you are watching has any meaning or significance, Gladiator 2 isn’t the worst way you could spend a grey Sunday afternoon.

It doesn’t have the heart of the original - or the likes of Russell Crowe, Richard Harris and Joachim Phoenix to make you suspend disbelief. Pedro Pascal and Denzel Washington do their best, but the script doesn’t give them much to work with.

Paul Mescal’s Lucius lacks the imperious fury that drives Russell Crowe’s Maximus. Supposedly consumed with ‘rage’, he delivers his lines with the kind of passion you might expect from a Curries assistant explaining the advantages of a new mobile phone.

Early on in the film, he tells Denzel Washington’s Macrinus that he doesn’t know who his parents are. Then he pretends not to recognise his mother, before recognizing her after all. He then rejects her for having abandoned him as a child. Finally, he ends up fighting in the Colosseum to save her life, wearing his father’s armour. Maybe this was meant to be Freudian, or Oedipal destiny or something, but it feels more like sloppy writing.

Other aspects of Lucius’s character are equally incoherent. One minute he hates Rome and boasts that it will fall if he gives it ‘just one push.’ The next minute he’s quoting Virgil. By the end of the film, he’s calling on the legions to remember the ‘dream of Rome’ as a ‘place of refuge’, much like Kamala Harris calling on voters to believe in the promise of America.

There’s no way any of this makes sense. But sense isn’t the point here. This is a money-making spectacle - a pallid photocopy of the original which numbs the viewer into a state of dazed indifference through the kind of overkill that Ridley Scott can still provide even at the age of eighty-six.

So this time, we get not just one pervy dictator, but two, with orange hair and syphilis! And one them carries a monkey - in a dress! - on his shoulder, which he appoints as his consul, because why the hell not?

It’s like a Viz comic version of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that spells out D.E.C.A.D.E.N.C.E for the hard of hearing.

Fortunately, there is enough violence to keep you from dwelling on such things. So much in fact, that the fights blur into a whizzbang Dolby crunching, squelching and grunting, spurting blood fest. Mescal, like all the other gladiators, looks like he’s spent months at the gym with a personal trainer, preparing for a role which requires him to do little more than smash peoples heads in at little or no cost to himself.

At one point, a gladiator trainer pummels him in the face with a spiked leather glove. A few blows like that would strip the flesh from most men’s faces in short order, but Mescal is barely scratched, either in this or any of the other brawls that eventually transform him, like his father into Rome’s saviour and redeemer.

During this Joseph Campbell-like heroic journey, he throttles a CGI baboon dog that looks like Gromit injected with crack; slaughters a gladiator riding a CGI rhinoceros - and the rhinoceros; and goes on to fight a sea battle in the Colosseum - difficult enough if you think it through - with sharks thrown in for good measure.

Sharks? I hear you ask. Where did the Romans get them from? How did they transport them to Rome, given that there aren’t even sharks in the Mediterranean?

Stop. It’s not a documentary, and as long as you don’t think about it much - or preferably, at all - it’s good, wholesome, blood-soaked fun. And yet the World’s Richest Man is not amused. And other Internet swamp-dwellers, following in the wake of Maximus Rocketus, are asking the million-dollar question of whether or not ‘Gladiator is woke?’

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The most obvious reason for this disquiet is the presence of Denzel Washington. Then there is Paul Mescal’s North African wife - a fighting woman, though not for long. Black men in positions of power in ancient Rome? Female fighters? Political correctness gone mad.

Some of these culture warriors have criticised Washington’s New York accent as an anachronism. Have these critics not heard Tony Curtis proclaiming ‘Yonder stands the castle of my faddah’ in Vikings? Or identifying himself as ‘Antonius, singer of songs’ in Spartacus, in the kind of accent you would expect to find from a pretzel seller in Prospect Park?

The Netflix series Barbaren has Romans actually speaking Latin, which is rather enjoyable, and even though the German-speaking barbarians look like members of an obscure Teutonic heavy metal band, it’s satisfying to see the Romans get a kicking in the Teuteburger wald.

But no one in this or any Hollywood Roman movies ever sounds like a Roman. It’s difficult not to conclude that the criticisms of Washington’s character have another source…I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I suspect it has something to do with Musk’s suggestion in a podcast that ‘Rome fell because the Romans stopped making Romans’. He made the same observation here:

Musk is a proponent of the white nationalist ‘great replacement theory’. Earlier this year, he suggested that Joe Biden is smuggling immigrants into the US to become Democratic voters. So when he says that Romans weren’t producing enough Romans, it’s fairly safe to assume that he means they weren’t producing enough white people.

And someone who looks at the present and the past through a lens like that is not going to accept that a black former gladiator might have hung around with syphilitic emperors.

White Rome

This association between the Rome and whiteness is a well-worn theme in the far-right’s fascination with the Roman Empire. As Donna Zuckerberg, the author of Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age, argues:

“Western civilization” has, for the alt-right, become culturally acceptable code for “white culture.” So celebration of Western civilization is really a way to celebrate the cultural achievements of white men. They see ancient Greece and Rome as a starting point for this imagined idea of Western civilization, and later it evolves to include Christianity in the medieval period. It gives them a unified cultural narrative to draw on.

This ‘narrative’ is one of the reasons why Internet trolls once freaked out at the suggestion that Roman Britain might have been racially and ethnically diverse. And when such claims from a historian who also happens to be a woman, they can always expect to be viciously trolled, as Mary Beard has been on various occasions, because the Roman Empire was a man’s world and thinking it is a man’s work - even men who dress up in togas in their mother’s basements.

Romophilia isn’t a product of the internet age per se. Like the 300 Spartans, or the Crusaders, Rome constitutes a kind of mythos that the fascist imagination can apply to different historical contexts.

In his bestselling 1961 novel The Centurions, the ex-paratrooper Jean Lartéguy, compared his former comrades in Algeria to Roman legionnaires, guarding the limes (frontiers) of civilization against ‘international communism’, to the indifference of a decadent French society infested with effete intellectuals.

In one episode, Lartéguy’s paratrooper-centurions kill the entire adult male population of a village in response to an FLN atrocity, and line up the bodies ‘with their throats cut, their heads turned towards the West, in the direction of Rome.’

Marvellous stuff. But that’s how you have to defend civilisation sometimes. And when you stop fighting, or even worse you let the barbarians live in your capital, then your women will stop producing little Romans, and Rome stops being Rome, and ipso facto, civilization collapses before you can say quo vadis.

Such possibilities have increasingly found there way into discussions of the world’s only superpower. In a March 2001 article in Time magazine on the ‘Bush Doctrine’, the late Charles Krauthammer described America as ‘the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome’ with a similar ability to ‘reshape norms, alter expectations and create new realities’ through ‘implacable demonstrations of will’.

The question of whether ‘America is Rome’ often flitted in and out of foreign policy discussions during the ‘war on terror’. And these discussions were increasingly accompanied by declinist anxieties that the United States might actually be ‘like Rome’ in the way that Edward Gibbon once depicted the Roman Empire - a disintegrating republic overwhelmed by political and financial corruption and public dishonour, and finally by dictatorship, before succumbing to the barbarian invasions.

In the early years of the century, that outcome didn’t seem as probable as it does now. Then, the ‘new Rome’ reigned supreme. Now, neo-Nazis at Charlotteville carry the Roman Legion flag, and immigrants and refugees are the new barbarians - whether ‘shipped in’ by Joe Biden or by foolish multiculturalists and ‘race traitors’ - who will bring civilization to an end with the help of the ‘feminazis’ who are failing to churn out enough manly white Romans.

This is the toxic trough the World’s Richest Man drinks from. And you can see why he wouldn’t want to see Rome populated by black gladiators and crazed dictators with orange hair, and heroes preaching to the legions about Rome’s lost honour, ending corruption, and falling standards in public life.

It must all feel a little close to home to the billionaire tech bro who now sits on the shoulder of the mad Emperor of Mar-a-Lago - both of whom bear out the old Roman adage: in regione caecorum rex est luscus ‘in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’

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So Long Twitterland

After some weeks of preparation and much longer thinking about it, I’ve finally deactivated my Twitter/X account and joined the exodus to Bluesky. This ends a period in my digital life that began in 2011. I initially joined Twitter at the instigation of my former agent, who suggested that this was a novel way in which we writers could get ‘exposure.’

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I’m not sure how much exposure I ever got for my writing, but Twitter certainly exposed me to a new world I hadn’t realised existed.

Unlike some of the users who are now abandoning it I have no nostalgia for the golden age of Twitter. I always found the platform disturbing, often alarming, and sometimes downright enraging. It consistently brought home to me, in a way that that nothing else has, that the moral universe I thought I belonged to was not the one that many other people were living in.

Freud made the point more than once that individual moral choices are always dependent to some extent on social norms and the approbation of our peers. In that sense, Twitter was a kind of anti-Freud space where the Id seemed to have kicked the superego into the long grass.

It was a place where people (insofar far as I knew) could engage in rampant dishonesty, and say the worst, the cruellest and the nastiest things that came to mind without, for the most part, without any consequences or repercussions, beyond the loss of their accounts.

These tendencies weren’t limited exclusively to the right and the far-right, but it was these sectors, as we now know to our cost, that made the most effective use of Twitter and other social media platforms, and used these networks to ‘flood the zone with shit’, as Steve Bannon memorably put it.

Friends would sometimes ask me what was the point of inhabiting a world like that, as if Twitter was some kind of irrelevant distraction from political or social normality or serious political discourse.

It’s true that most people you meet in the flesh don’t usually behave in the way that they might do on Twitter, but that didn’t mean the platform was irrelevant. For the last thirteen years, it had provided me with a mostly unfiltered ringside view of the extremist politics that have been ravaging one democracy after another over the last thirteen years.

Again and again, it made me painfully aware that twenty-first century politics is being shaped by forces that are mostly ignored or marginalized by the celebrity presenter breakfast show, Newsnight or Question Time formats through which mainstream political conversation is conducted.

On Twitter, you saw twenty-first century political life raw in tooth and claw: the gaslighting, the hatred, the bullying, the sexism and racism, the gleeful pile-ons, the vicious shit-stirring, the conspiracy-theorising, the trolling and the victimization of the vulnerable. You saw how utterly mediocre rightwing ‘influencers’ and provocateurs amassed huge followings through saying the unsayable - the unsayable mostly meaning the worst thing they could think of to get the outrage and the clicks.

You saw how (in) famous and lesser-known political grifters skilfully used the platform to shape agendas and promote themselves. And all this unfolding on a global scale.

This was often depressing, but it was also morbidly compulsive. Many times, I would find myself wondering, can this be real? Do people like this really exist? Only to discover that it was, and they did.

But negativity wasn’t the whole story. Twitter could also be funny, heart-warming, quick-witted and downright hilarious. I learned a lot from it. If Twitter was the place where I discovered monstrosities like David Vance, Katie Hopkins, Bernie Spofforth and Ben Shapiro, it was also where I discovered Chris Grey, Sangita Myska, Clare Hepworth, Russ Jackson and many other followers and people I’ve followed, some of whom I still connect with on Bluesky.

Twitter was a place where you could feel part of international communities of like-minded strangers, in a world where such communities are increasingly absent. It definitely wasn’t a safe space, but it was a space where you could extend and sometimes receive affirmation and solidarity; where you could observe political events unfolding in real-time, and hear perspectives that you are not going to get from Laura Kuenssberg or Robert Peston.

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It was also a place where you could respond to what was being said, and there was a time when I often did, and not always politely. There is a reason why I was blocked by the likes of Alison Pearson, Andrew Neil or Daniel Hannan.

I didn’t abuse or bully, or instigate pile-ons, but I wasn’t respectful to people who were not worthy of respect.

What did I accomplish through these interactions? Probably not much, beyond the ephemeral satisfactions of calling out lies, disinformation, bigotry or racism, in a public forum.

I used Twitter - possibly too much - as a political outlet, in a time of political despair. I vented, wrote threads, shared and re-shared. I entered conversations that were probably best avoided.

This was not always good for my productivity, because Twitter, like so much of social media, can easily become the thief of time. To paraphrase Neil Postman, you can end up scrolling yourself to death, when you could be doing better things. Or else you could find yourself arguing with people over subjects that can’t easily be discussed in 140 or 280 characters.

So why am I leaving it? The answer can be summed up in two words: Elon. Musk.

Because Twitter was always a forum for disinformation and misinformation even before Musk acquired the platform in 2022. But under Jack Dorsey, there was at least some content moderation. Death threats were usually out. Racial hatred and vicious sexist insults were out. Twitter’s notion of ‘community standards’ often seemed lax to me, but at least they existed. Twitter did take down the accounts of Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate, Katie Hopkins, and Donald Trump, to name but a few.

The Fall of the House of X

And then the World’s Richest Man took over the platform and brought the scrapings of humanity back, and all this in the name of ‘civilization’ or the ‘future of humanity’, or whatever other pompous terminology Musk thought made him sound profound.

And since that happened, the little blue bird no longer tweets. And Twitter has become a howling wilderness where names like ‘Tommy’, ‘Farage’, ‘Trump’ and ‘Elon’ and other defenders of civilization, appear on your ‘For You’ feed from the moment you wake up.

There is now almost nothing that anyone can say that will get them taken down, and no troll so malignant that Musk’s now-miniscule regulatory team won’t accept them. As if a sewer pipe has burst somewhere, the platform is flooded with porn bots, trolls, Nazis, and fascists.

And who can be surprised, when the man who owns the platform behaves like a sneering troll himself, and boosts the algorithms of his own company to make sure that his own startlingly ignorant, vicious and/or idiotic tweets trend?

If this is civilization, give me the barbarians any time.

Since Musk took over, I’ve also noticed that I no longer connect with the people I used to connect with; my own followers are draining away for no apparent reason, my tweets get almost no engagement.

It’s a dark magic, and I don’t even begin to comprehend it.

But I, like many people, began to wonder what was the point of being there. Especially when Musk coolly attempted to trigger ‘civil war’ in the UK by enabling disinformation about the Southport riots, and then doubling down on it in his own tweets.

And what has the Labour government done in response to this?

Not much. Starmer & co appear as mesmerised by rich people as Tony Blair’s governments once were.

No one familiar with Peter Mandelson will be surprised that the front runner to become US ambassador has urged the UK to get over its ‘feud’ with Musk, and ‘kick it into touch as soon as possible.’

Sorry, but when a billionaire attempts to incite ‘civil war’ and allows some of the worst people in your country to harm some of its most vulnerable communities, that is not a ‘feud.’ When the same man attacks your government’s policing policies, and calls you ‘two-tier Keir’, that man is not ‘feuding’ with you.

Back in August, when the Labour government declared - rightly - that it would ‘not tolerate attacks on mosques or on Muslim communities’, Musk responded with an alt-right talking point: ‘Shouldn’t you be concerned about attacks on all communities?’

At the time, the government described the riots as ‘organised illegal thuggery which has no place on our streets or online.’ Musk was crucial to that ‘online’ element, but Mandelson - a politician who never saw a rich man he couldn’t get on with - has urged Starmer to use Nigel Farage as a ‘bridgehead’ to Musk and Trump!

This is not statesmanship. It is not political skill. It is not even realpolitik. It is shameless pandering to someone who despises you and wants to destroy you.

In October, Technology Secretary Peter Kyle tried to play the same game, by declaring himself ‘slack-jawed’ with amazement at the ‘staggering achievement’ of one of Musk’s booster rockets, and said that if Musk opens an investment fund in the UK, ‘I will be first in queue to knock at his door to see if we can get it here into Britain.’

One can’t feeling that something more than this is required to fight the political forces that Musk has helped unleash. The semblance of a spine or moral backbone would help.

Because how has Musk responded to all that sycophancy? By supporting a petition for a new election in the UK, on the utterly spurious and nonsensical grounds that Labour is presiding over a ‘tyrannical police state.’

And now Trump has won the election, in part, because of the money Musk invested in him, and because of the platform that Musk gave back to him.

Such practices represent a clear and present danger to democracy, and the unwillingness of my government and so many others to make Musk and his tech bro cohorts accountable is the most disastrous and shameful cowardice. And that is one more reason why I left Twitter. Because my presence there now feels like complicity. I don’t condemn those who have decided to stay. Nor do I expect Musk to lose much sleep over my departure.

I’m aware of the dangers of living in echo chambers, but I see nothing more to be gained or learned from X. I’ve heard enough. At the end of Seven, Detective Somerset quotes from Hemingway, and says, ‘“The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for”. I agree with the second part.’

Spend enough time on Twitter/X, and you won’t even agree with the second part.

And so I have abandoned Musk’s house of horrors, along with so many others. I hope it collapses, like Poe’s house of Usher, and that I too will one day look back as the ‘deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of Twitter.’

Though unlike Roderick Usher, Musk has probably got what he wanted from it, and will now go on to wreck the US government, even as my own government prostrates itself before him.

But now I’m enjoying the Bluesky thinking. I don’t know if it’s an echo chamber, but it feels calmer, and the digital air smells cleaner. It’s less crowded, but that doesn’t bother me, because it’s actually a relief to come across so many people who don’t make me ashamed of my species.

They remind me that our world - despite the evidence of Twitter and the sociopathic troll who ran it into the ground - is a fine place and worth fighting for.

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Through a Glass Darkly

There was a time, not that long ago in fact, when the American military and national security establishment thought a great deal about the future, particularly what science fiction writers call the ‘near future’. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, military thinktanks and annual reviews regularly produced futurist reports and papers, which attempted to anticipate what might be lurking just around the corner and how the military might respond to it.

Generally speaking, these possibilities tended to accentuate the negative. In fact, the future was often imagined in strikingly bleak terms. Pandemics; ‘feral cities’ taken over by terrorists or organized crime; abrupt climate change events followed by migratory surges and the collapse of borders; rogue states; strategic reversals in Afghanistan; challenges to US military power; the breakdown of globalisation - all these scenarios flitted through the anxious minds of the military futurists.

Against the background of the ‘global war on terror’, it was all too easy to extrapolate the worst that the present had to offer into a hellish future.

Terrorism and 9/11 were recurring themes in these dystopian musings. In the wake of 9/11, American military and national security intellectuals were encouraged to ‘think the unthinkable’ and imagine that everything that could go wrong, might go wrong, and try to second guess every ‘known unknown’ or unanticipated ‘black swan’ event that might catch the US by surprise.

Imagination was crucial to this process. Military futurists drew heavily on science fiction, cyberpunk, and dystopian movies that already depicted a future world that no one would willingly choose to inhabit. In effect, the military took inspiration from what the cyberpunk writer and near future pioneer William Gibson calls ‘the fuckedness quotient of the day.’

For those who are interested, I wrote a piece about this phenomenon back in 2010, which you can find here.

At the time, I was struck by the astonishing grimness of the Pentagon’s imagined futures, and curious about why this was happening. After all, it wasn’t that long since we had been told that the good guys had won the Cold War, that history was over, and that our ‘borderless’ world was advancing towards a common future of prosperity and the irresistible advance of liberal democracy - all this policed by the most powerful military force in human history.

Yet less than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, here were military futurists contemplating a future in which the US military might be operating in ‘arcs of instability’ and ‘arcs of chaos’, in response to the nefarious permutations of the ‘dark side of globalisation.’

Some of this dystopianism was a consequence of 9/11. Having been taken by surprise by an attack that was considered ‘unimaginable’, the US military set out to out-imagine its enemies. Vulnerability and strategic anxiety was also accompanied by megalomania. In the first decade of the century, the US military was still intent on attaining ‘full spectrum dominance’ in every theatre of war, in order to eliminate any regional ‘challenger.’

At a time when US marines were fighting ‘insurgents’ in cities like Mosul and Fallujah, and trying to develop the tactics and strategies to conduct Military Operations on Urban Terran (MOUT), it was easy for US futurists to project the actual ‘feral cities’ of the present onto the future.

This was a period in which politicians from Tony Blair, to Richard Perle and Dick Cheney used the threat of the ‘next 9/11’ and the changed ‘calculus of risk’ to justify military ‘interventions’ anywhere.

And so the present bled into the future, and the future bled into the present.

Obsessed with the prospect of full spectrum dominance and maintaining global American ‘primacy’ through military means, the Pentagon and its affiliated research departments imagined a new era of warfare, in which the military would be able to ‘dominate’ the battlegrounds of the future.

Autonomous robots, nanotechnologies, ‘Pulsed Energy Projectiles’ (PEPs), super-soldiers with ‘self-healing uniforms’; killer wasps and mosquitoes; the Pentagon’s ‘Prompt Global Strike’ programme - these were only some of the options through which the US military sought to extend its global reach indefinitely.

Borrowing from the Israeli military, the US military constructed mock ’Arab cities’ where its soldiers rehearsed tactics to use against ‘insurgents’ played by actors, in preparation for wars of the present and wars of the future. The US National Intelligence Council (NIC) produced a series of regular future-planning reviews, often illustrated with dramatised hypothetical outcomes to concentrate the mind.

One scenario imagined China taking over security following the NATO evacuation of Afghanistan. Another contained a ‘hypothetical letter’ written by the (fictional) grandson of Osama bin Laden announcing the creation of a ‘partial Islamic Caliphate’ in an unnamed Middle Eastern country in 2020.

These predictions were not entirely wrong. The NATO occupation of Afghanistan did collapse. Islamic State did create a ‘partial Islamic Caliphate’ in Iraq and Syria, using the US military’s own weapons in the first instance. There has been a global pandemic.

But that’s the future for you: If you set out to imagine everything that can go wrong, you will inevitably get some things right. But knowing this did not make the military any more effective. By the time, NATO withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2022, the US had spent two decades fighting an open-ended ‘war on terror’ that left a swathe of death, chaos and destruction across the world without achieving a single coherent strategic objective.

For all its attempts to achieve ‘full spectrum dominance’, the US could not translate its military power into strategic victory either in Afghanistan, or in its showcase ‘bringing democracy to the Middle East’ war in Iraq.

And despite its willingness to ‘think the unthinkable’, the military’s concern with the future did not predict the near-collapse of an unregulated financial system in 2007-2008 - a manifestation of the ‘dark side of globalisation’ that had nothing to do with al Qaeda or organized crime, and everything to with the inherent weaknesses and fragilities of the system that the US military was supposedly policing.

Militarism both concealed and exacerbated these weaknesses. And in their obsession with things breaking and cracking up beyond America’s borders, the military futurists did consider the possibility that the United States was also capable of collapse. It is true that in 2007, the US Army’s Strategic Studies Institute included the possibilities of ‘toxic populism’ and ‘catastrophic dislocation inside the United States or homegrown domestic civil disorder’ amongst the ‘known unknowns’ that the military might one day have to respond to.

But these dystopian scenarios did not include the possibility that a rightwing mob would attack the Capitol building in an attempt to overthrow an elected government, with the support of the outgoing president; that a reality TV celebrity and corrupt real-estate magnate would become president not once, but twice, with the assistance of America’s enemies.

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The military did not - and perhaps could not - imagine that the American public would vote for the worst president in US history, even after that same president had been found to be a criminal and a rapist.

No one imagined back then, that this president would appoint a billionaire to head a non-governmental agency named after a cryptocurrency, with a mandate to strip the US government to the bone. Or that a rapist and serial sex offender would appoint an alleged sex-trafficker and paedophile as his attorney-general, with orders to attack the officials who had attempted to bring him to justice.

Even William Gibson would struggle to imagine a world in which an American president would appoint a talk show host, alleged sex offender, white supremacist and former Guantanamo guard as defence secretary to lead the most powerful military in the world. How could the National Intelligence Council predict that a suspected ally of Vladimir Putin would be appointed as head of…the National Intelligence Council, as part of her remit as head of intelligence? Or that a vaccine-denying conspiracy theorist would become health secretary?

And all this supported by the Republican Party, by millions of voters, and with the passive acceptance of America’s famed democratic institutions.

Such outcomes were once beyond the imagination. Now they have become part of an already-existing dystopia that, until the last few weeks, most people believed was ‘unthinkable.’ As the military futurists once recognized, you can’t anticipate all the ‘known unknowns’ - there will always be something that eludes even the most imaginative and blue sky-thinking futurist.

But strategic forecasting is even more difficult if you do it with blinkers on. If, for example, you are too dazzled by your own military power to appreciate its limitations. If you take it for granted that global military dominance is the way to achieve national security, and you fight wars without clear goals and no interest in the strategies of your enemies.

Obsessed with repairing the damage to its aura of invulnerability after 9/11, the US launched itself into a military campaign against an enemy that cannot be defeated by purely military means - a war that, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project in 2021, had cost $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths. Only the arms companies and the military subcontractors and PMCs benefitted.

Al Qaeda’s devastating strike on September 11 deliberately invited precisely this kind of outcome as part of its strategy of radicalization. And in a sense, al-Qaeda has won, even though it no longer exists in any significant form.

It drew a wounded superpower into a global war that it could never hope to win, which wasted its resources and drained its credibility and prestige. Now, in part because of the lies, violence, and financial and human cost that made that war possible, American democracy is collapsing under the weight of its own unresolved problems.

Who can forget when George W. Bush boasted of victory in a war in Iraq that America ultimately lost? Or hailed a gathering of the ‘haves and have mores’ as his ‘base’?

We can only wonder what might have happened, if US governments - both Republican and Democrats - had paid more attention to the ‘have littles’ or ‘have nothings’ within their own borders. We cannot know what might have happened had some of that $8 trillion been spent on the communities that have now turned so destructively against their government, instead of on useless wars.

Instead, the likes of Richard Perle, John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney conned Americans into supporting a global military offensive against the ‘barbarians’ of the 21st century, in a vain attempt to impose a quasi-imperial Pax Americana on a turbulent and chaotic world.

Convinced of their country’s virtues, these shallow would-be statesman ignored its vices. Consumed by a concept of national security that exaggerated the dangers of terrorism, either wilfully and opportunistically or out of sheer naivete, they responded to al Qaeda’s savage challenge on al-Qaeda’s terms.

None of this made Americans any safer. It arguably made America weaker. And now America, and the rest of the world, must find a way to navigate the next four years of what is effectively a kakistocracy - the government of the worst possible people.

The seventeenth-century preacher Paul Gosnold once condemned a ‘mad kinde of Kakistocracy’, perpetuated by ‘Sanctimonious Incendiaries, who have fetched fire from heaven to set their Country in combustion’ and ‘set the Kingdome on fire to rost their owne egges.’

These sanctimonious incendiaries will be leading America into the future. Let’s condemn them, by all means, but let’s not forget the folly of those who set out to ‘own’ the dystopian future, and ultimately left their country fatally vulnerable to a dystopia they had not foreseen.

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Triumph of the Swill

Many years ago, in my late teens, I read Anatoli Kusnetzov’s documentary novel Babi Yar about the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. In one chapter, Kusnetzov steps away from his boyhood memories of the Nazi occupation, and delivers a stern warning to the post-war generation that had not experienced the horrors that he described:

THE PERSON WHO TODAY IGNORES POLITICS WILL REGRET IT. I did not say I liked politics. I hate them. I scorn them. I do not call upon you to like them or even respect them. I am simply telling you: DON’T IGNORE THEM.

At the time, I took these words to mean that politics can be vicious beyond our immediate ability to imagine it; that we should not take the stability of our political systems for granted, because the most brutal and unpredictable outcomes can emerge seemingly out of nowhere. We might also find ourselves facing some incomprehensible calamity, just as the youthful Kusnetzov once did in Kiev when he watched the Soviet flag replaced by the swastika, and saw his own countrymen assist the Nazi occupiers in the massacre of 100,000 Jews at Babi Yar.

It’s more than five decades since I read those words, and in that time many countries have been engulfed by wars, civil wars and dictatorships that took them by surprise. For most of those years, western democracies considered themselves immune to political calamities of a similar magnitude.

Their citizens might not like or may even loathe their governments; they might become disillusioned and disgusted with those they voted for. They might even be bored by the tedious rituals of democratic politics. But most of them believed that their societies were resilient enough to avoid the political disasters to which supposedly less-favoured countries were prone.

We were citizens of the free world, after all. We were taught to believe in consensus, in the peaceful handover of power, and the concept of accountability that all politicians were expected to observe, especially those who aspired to leadership positions.

These views were particularly strongly held in the United States, where the office of the presidency or the ‘commander-in-chief’ was imbued with the quasi-sacred aura passed down through the constitution and the wishes of the founding fathers.

Since 2016, that model has been crumbling. Or perhaps more accurately, 2016 revealed the cracks that too many Americans had previously ignored. That year, America elected a wealthy reality tv star as their president, despite clear indications that he was morally and intellectually unfit for the office he held.

In 2020, American voters rejected Trump and gave the Democrats a narrow victory. Despite the Trumpian/MAGA refusal to accept this outcome, which veered into vexatious litigation and sedition, the famous guardrails prevailed and decency was reasserted, or so it seemed.

And yet last week, 74, 264, 469 Americans voted for Donald Trump a second time. Only a few days after Trump had been mimicking giving a blowjob on camera, they elected a convicted felon who has presided over one of the most savagely racist electoral campaigns in American history.

No one made them do this. Voters had a choice, however imperfect, because democratic politics rarely is perfect, and millions of Americans chose Donald Trump.

Over the last week I’ve read many explanations for this outcome: that it was the Democrats’ punishment for turning their backs on the working class. That Harris was a weak candidate who fought a weak campaign. That Harris was a good candidate who waged a skilful campaign, but had no time to make it count. That voters were worried about inflation. That it was payback for Gaza. That Biden should have stepped down. That Biden shouldn’t have stepped down. That Elon Musk and Joe Rogan swung it.

Whichever explanation or combination of explanations you accept, the fact remains that America has just elected an authoritarian demagogue with ties to the extreme-right, who once tried to overthrow an elected government and might have attempted to do it again if he hadn’t won at the ballot box.

Some may say that Trump’s supporters don’t believe he was guilty of any of these crimes and misdemeanours. But there can be no excuse for not knowing what Trump was and is. Everything about him has been out in the open for the last four years. And the fact that so many people have willingly embraced a man of such low character, morals and intellect, is a stunning indictment of American society.

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In making this choice, Americans have opted for the worst that America has to offer. Many commentators have sought parallels in 1930s Europe for this descent into the authoritarian vortex. Such comparisons are not groundless. Trump’s movement has reached into the political emotions that informed fascism - the cruelty and resentment, the ethnonationalist chauvinism, the racism, brutish hyper-masculinity and the loathing of liberalism. Trump has identified and catered to the cult-like compulsion that can overtake electorates at certain times, to prostrate themselves before a strongman/leader.

But Trumpism is too corrupt and ideologically incoherent to morph into fully-fledged fascism. It doesn’t - at least for now - have an imperialist military dimension. Although Trump, like Hitler, came to power through elections, his movement lacks the fully-thought out program that enabled the Nazis to impose their gleichshaltung (coordination) on German society in a matter of months. Unlike the 1930s, Trump’s second coming did not follow a global depression, or the years of political street fighting that the Nazis helped orchestrate in order to present themselves as the antidote to Germany’s national insecurity problem.

This time there is no Versailles Treaty or military defeat to blame on the Jews. If many Americans are struggling financially, they are not buying bread with wheelbarrows full of dollars. The election took place at a time when the US economy was doing better than any other, when inflation was falling, and wages were rising.

So Trump’s victory cannot be interpreted a cry for help from the hardworking man or woman with no one else to turn to. American voters turned to Trump either because they found his vices appealing, or because they were too selfish to allow these vices to get in the way of their own hoped-for advancement.

In electing a criminal so that he could pardon himself, American voters sent a signal to anyone who can get away with it that the rule of law no longer matters. In ignoring a man who lies whenever he opens his mouth, these voters announced that the truth does not matter to them either.

In their belief that Kamala Harris’s Democrats were communists, these voters demonstrated that they don’t know what communism is. In voting for a man who is now beholden to Elon Musk - an unelected billionaire, far-right extremist and Putin sympathiser - these voters demonstrated an obscene veneration for wealth that is unencumbered by any concerns about the security of their own country.

This is not something you can easily step back from. No democracy can survive such idiocy, superficiality, selfishness and venality, and it is questionable whether American democracy will survive the next four or more years in its current form.

This shocking decision has terrible implications for democracies everywhere. The Democrats were stunningly complacent following their 2020 victory and allowed Trump to rebuild. It’s difficult to have any faith whatsoever in the ability of Starmer and his team of timid technocrats to act as a bastion of democratic values, either internationally or in regard to the would-be Trumps who stalk our own crumbling polity.

Already, the Speaker of the House has reportedly invited Trump to speak in the Commons, and Farage has offered to act as an ‘intermediary’ between the British government and Trump, while calling on the government to ‘roll out the red carpet’ to the rapist-criminal.

Courting political pathogens will not stop them spreading, but this is what Starmer and his government will almost certainly try to do, while claiming to act in the national interest.

The European Union is too divided, and its members too vulnerable to similar movements, to react with the urgency required. The ‘fourth estate’ - as it used to be called - has already begun to turn the Trump mafia freakshow into a celebrity showbiz phenomenon, and normalise what should not be considered normal by an society that values its own democratic survival.

Insofar as there is any consolation to be taken from this calamity, it is that millions of Americans did not vote for Trump. Millions share the views of the Illinois governor JB Pritzker:

This is what the British government should be saying. And what European governments should also be saying, but don’t hold your breath.

Our task is to support that other America, however beaten and vanquished, and remember that it exists. To show solidarity with those who are about to be attacked: women, immigrants, minorities. To continue to tell the truth unflinchingly, and hold onto the idea of the truth even in this rotten age of lies and billionaire-funded disinformation platforms. To find allies and build alliances where we can. To bring pressure on our governments to act with the decency and the urgency required, against a global movement that threatens all of us.

Because all of us must live with the consequences of America’s leap into the void, and many of those who voted for Trump will also have to do the same. They will find out that tariffs will hurt them too; that ‘dark gothic’ billionaires and ‘high status males’ do not necessarily have their interests at heart; that millions may lose their health insurance and any support from their government, as the likes of Musk and Peter Thiel gut its institutions in their own interests; that their friends and relatives will also be deported.

Because America will get worse, before - if - it gets better. And in these circumstances, I’m not going to repeat Kamala Harris’s slogan that when we fight we win, because as last week has shown, you can fight and also lose, even if you have Beyoncé and Taylor Swift on your side. Nor do I want to reiterate hollow platitudes about the audacity of hope, because right now, there is very little hope on the progressive side of the political spectrum.

But no cause is lost until it is finally abandoned by those who once believed in it. And we have no choice but to resist the destructive forces that are spreading across the western world, and to try to believe, despite the increasing evidence to the contrary, that democracy can be saved and that democracy is actually worth saving; that politics can be a vehicle for the common good, not just a confidence trick.

So if you feel the urge to switch off or tune out, I don’t blame you. But heed Kusnetzov’s warning. Because as depressing and dispiriting as our current predicament may be, there really is no escape from the political decisions that other people make.

And in this shallow, foolish, insane political age, we should remember that no country is immune to the disease that has infected the American republic, and which may destroy it.

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